In an interview this week, Justice Stevens said he isn’t “a fan of voter ID” and wasn’t in 2008. But he said his opinion was correct because the challengers failed to present enough evidence showing the requirement suppressed poor and minority voters. “My opinion should not be taken as authority that voter-ID laws are always OK,” Justice Stevens said. “The decision in the case is state-specific and record-specific.”

“I have always thought that David Souter got the thing correct, but my own problem with the case was that I didn’t think the record supported everything he said in his opinion,” said Justice Stevens, who retired in 2010. “He got a lot of stuff off the Internet and inferred things and so forth.” But “as a matter of actual history, he’s dead right. The impact of the statute is much more serious” on poor, minority, disabled and elderly voters than evidence in the 2008 case demonstrated, he said.

Essay: Race or Party, Race as Party, or Party All the Time: Three Uneasy Approaches to Conjoined Polarization in Redistricting and Voting Cases, William and Mary Law Review (forthcoming 2018) (draft available)

After Scalia: The Future of United States Election Law, America-Ho (in Japanese, forthcoming 2016)